Railroads?

[Enigma_Nova]

Off topic.
*railroads*
You don't just lay down some railroad tracks in the middle of nowhere and have 4 nodes sprout up.

Railroad tracks come from somwhere, and go to somewhere.
That's how it should be modelled in the game - a railroad track isn't a tile, it's a link between tiles.

So you can get two railroad tracks running parallel to one-another without a crossover junction every mile.

[Drachasor]

At first I was skeptical of your idea, Nova, but now I think it could work very well. I was worried about the interface issue, but now I see that wouldn't be a problem. When you build a railroad, you just select where you want it to go from the current square. You then spend some time in the starting square, then the worker moves to the destination square to finish it. This would take a bit of time, but that' the idea.

It should really cut down on railroad sprawl if done, as it would just take too much time to put it everywhere.

I think this also makes sense for roads too.

-Drachasor

[Vince278]

Originally posted by Enigma_Nova
But if Germany had Railroads, the allies would have been stuffed.

From a Civ standpoint that would definitely have been true.

[Tassadar500]

Maybe, the railroads can't be used as tiles, until they are connected city to city?

[Vince278]

Originally posted by Drachasor
1. Avoid having Germans east, west, and south of them.

If the object is to kill Germans then going where they are is logical.

Originally posted by Drachasor
2. They wanted to *liberate* Europe, so just going in and attacking Germany wouldn't have accomplished they. There still would have been large contingents of German troops elsewhere.

Those German troops elsewhere would feel very frightened and lonely with Germany itself taken out of the picture.

Originally posted by Drachasor
3. They wanted to have a direct line of supply for the troops, and to make it as unlikely as possible that the supplies lines could be attacked. As it was, Patton pushed things almost to the breaking point on the supply end.

For the allies, sending in supplies via Kiel and Copenhagen wouldn't be that much different than sending them in via Cherbourg and Antwerp.
For the Germans, they would have a difficult time maintaining supply lines if Germany itself fell.

[Vince278]

Originally posted by Nuclear Master
Maybe, the railroads can't be used as tiles, until they are connected city to city?

There are always sub-stations along the way. Civ cities are major destinations but they aren't the only destinations.

[Tassadar500]

Vince, please stop posting off topic.
--
How many turns would it take to build a sub-station? 6?

[Vince278]

Originally posted by Nuclear Master
How many turns would it take to build a sub-station? 6?

Not necessary. Generally, I'm saying to keep things as they are with railroads. Superhighways as an upgrade to road movement ( 1/6 or 1/9 ) also sounds good to me. I'd like to keep things as simple as possible (and the programmers probably would too).

[Drachasor]

Enigma's idea, I believe, was that railroads would work largely the same as they already do, with the following differences:

1. When you build a railroad it connects two tiles along one edge.

2. Thereafter you can go between those two tiles at the standard RR movement cost.

3. Every tile can have up to 8 connections like this, each connecting the tile to one of its neighbors.

4. If you have two lines of railroad running parallel to each other, you can't move between them, even if they are next to each other. This is not true if you build a connecting rail between tiles.

----------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------

^two unconnected rail lines, right next to each other.

Basically you get a guaranteed benefit whenever you make a RR, that benefit is between the two tiles it connects. To connect a railroad to the 8 neighbors of one tile though, it takes 8 turns

So if you have a space of 3 by 3 square tiles:

OOO
OOO
OOO

It takes 20 builds of railroad to connect them as thoroughly as in CivII/III

OOO
OXO The Middle one takes 8
OOO

XOX
OOO The corners take 2 each to connect to the
XOX non-middle.

OXO
XOX The rest require 4 to connect along the diagnals.
OXO They are already connected to the middle and corners

This would greatly reduce railroad sprawl, as it would simply take too much work to connect everything in the CivII/III fashion.

-Drachasor

[Vince278]

I see what you are saying Drachasor but that would blow KISS right out of the water. I still like keeping it the way it is because having some instant movement in the game scale makes sense and is a big help in reaction and reorganization. Air units have this somewhat by rebasing with an unlimited range. Now if they only can do something for naval units: I hate taking dozens to hundreds of years to go anywhere (and thats on top of the time it takes to assemble a task force).

[Daz]

Unlimited movement kinda makes fleets and fortifications obsolete. Why the hell should I intercept those transports if I can smash them to pieces wit my 10 elite tanks. I mean, not many of us use marines to invade.

Secondly, someone mentioned that covering all tiles with RR looks gross. I agree.

[Enigma_Nova]

Originally posted by Drachasor
At first I was skeptical of your idea, Nova, but now I think it could work very well.

Thanks.

I was worried about the interface issue, but now I see that wouldn't be a problem. When you build a railroad, you just select where you want it to go from the current square. You then spend some time in the starting square, then the worker moves to the destination square to finish it.

It also removes the strange property of having a faster unit build a road to a destination quicker -
the railroad worker automatically moves to the next square, as if it built tracks behind it as it moved.

You -CAN- do this with tiles, too.
You just need 8 road and 8 rail tiles - North, Northeast, East...
and some sort of parser so that a railroad doesn't disappear into nothingness.

[Max Sinister]

But you'd need four or eight times more memory for this admittedly more realistic road/rail system. That's a disadvantage that outweighs the advantage. Sorry.

[Drachasor]

Originally posted by Max Sinister
But you'd need four or eight times more memory for this admittedly more realistic road/rail system. That's a disadvantage that outweighs the advantage. Sorry.

Actually the road system should take up very little of the used memory.

Now, you'd basically have 4 connections per square. Each of those can have a road, railroad, or neither. That is 12 possibilities, so 4 bits can handle it. Let's say you have a 20,000 square world (which is a lot), then that's 80,000 bits, which is 10,000 bytes, which is 10k (roughly). That's hardly anything.

Even with a world 1000 squares by 1000 squares, you are only using 500,000 bytes, which is just half a meg of ram.

Bad computers these days have 128 Megs, my computer has 512. I have a friend with a gig. The above numbers pose no problem.

Now, pathfinding would need to be more advanced, but I don't think this would pose much of an issue either.

-Drachasor

[Max Sinister]

Yes that's true. Or it would be true if the programmers designed it that way. I've always suspected that they've been a bit sloppy in this way. Why does a savegame in Civ3 need several megs space if you needed less than 200k in Civ2? The only new concept is culture...